Time for another “how I got hired” story, this time about my entrance into the video game industry. I’ve really enjoyed the time I spent working in games, and Turbine was maybe the best of it. Despite being the only job in my career where I had to support Windows servers.
A couple of years before I got to Turbine, I’d started playing their first MMO, Asheron’s Call, fondly known as AC. At the time, particularly if you were an AC player, AC was one of the big three massively multiplayer online RPGs or MMOs. The other two were Ultima Online and EverQuest. They were way bigger than AC, which was a distant third, although big enough to claim that third place status legitimately. Later on, Blizzard would destroy all of us with World of Warcraft (and cause me some difficulties getting datacenter space), but that’s another story.
It helped that Microsoft was the original AC publisher. The game had been developed by a bunch of Brown students in a basement, running on (if I recall correct) a BSD variant. The way I heard the story, Microsoft came along and said they’d be happy to publish the game — including hosting — as long as Turbine could port it to Windows. The port was fairly easy, including moving the database layer to Microsoft SQL, so the deal went through and the happy little team grew and pumped out updates and everything was fairly happy even if it wasn’t quite the success Microsoft had hoped for.
I started playing because this Magic: the Gathering fan writer I loved, Jamie Wakefield, had started writing about how much fun he was having on the player vs. player server. PvP has never been my thing; I was still awfully intrigued to the point where I bought a Windows desktop just so I could play. I chose the Solclaim server, which was not PvP, and just loved it. It turns out that MMOs in which I can do a solo grind while interacting with other humans to whatever degree I’m in the mood for is exactly my thing.
So when I left AltaVista, I emailed Turbine and said “Hey, I know you’re published by Microsoft and you don’t need someone who can manage datacenters, but if you ever find yourself in a position where you need someone to do that you should really get in touch with me. Your game rocks.” I got a nice email back saying “Sure, we’ll keep you on file,” and thought nothing more of it.
And since you know I wound up working for Turbine you know what came next. About a year after I quit AltaVista, after I moved back home to Boston to work for Endeca, I got an email from Mike Hogan, the VP of Technical Operations. He wanted me to come in for an interview. Of course I said yes.
You may be thinking “hey, Endeca isn’t on Bryant’s resume.” Yeah, I spent like three months there and I still feel kind of bad about it. Another story I’ll get to eventually. Sorry to all my hiring managers out there who had no idea; to everyone else, yep, you can leave stuff off your resume if you don’t want to talk about it.
So I drove out to Norwood and found this low slung warehouse. I mean that literally — the Turbine offices used to be a warehouse, which I guess made them pretty cheap. I figured out where the front door was, went on in, and the first thing that struck me was the incredible art all over the walls. Some of it was clearly Asheron’s Call art, but most of it wasn’t. So I asked what the story was.
“Oh,” they explained. “We do an art contest every month — mostly our artists participate but some engineers do too, and it just keeps things interesting to change the art all the time.”
That was precisely when I knew how much I wanted to work in gaming. At this point in my life I’d already realized I wasn’t going to be a technical writer, and I’d given up hope of being paid to be creative. Working around artists seemed like the next best thing, and seeing the employee art all over the walls really drove it home that making video games was a creative endeavor. I’ve taken great pleasure in enabling artistic game work ever since.
In a bit of a daze, I got dropped off at Mike Hogan’s office. He welcomed me in, and asked me if I knew why they were interviewing me. I had no idea — after all, Microsoft was their publisher. He smirked a bit, went to his whiteboard, and wrote two things on it:
“MEO” and “DDO.”
OK, this was clearly a bit of a test, so I thought hard and quickly. Turbine made fantasy MMOs. I mean, nobody was making MMOs in any other genre then so that was a gimmie. “O” had to stand for “Online” in both cases. DD…
“Dungeons and Dragons Online?” I asked.
“Yes!” I passed the test.
“I have no idea on the other one,” I admitted.
Mike said, with wholly deserved triumph, “Middle Earth Online.” I was flabbergasted. This was the year after Fellowship of the Ring had come out; Middle Earth was an insanely hot property. D&D wasn’t small either, although of course not on the scale of Tolkien. How the hell did a little video game company that wasn’t even in LA get both of those?
I don’t actually know the whole story. Part of it was that Mike had previously worked at Hasbro, owners of D&D, so he had the contacts to help make that happen. Part of it was that the Middle Earth license was a sublicense from Vivendi Games, who had done a deal with the Tolkien Estate way before the movies exploded. Part of it was that Jeffrey Anderson, who had come in as CEO a couple of years ago was a stupendous salesman. I’m sure there was lots of luck involved as well.
So, Mike explained, they needed to hire me to build out a full technical engineering team to set up datacenters for both of the two big new games and to take over running AC (and the newly launched sequel) once Turbine bought the full rights back from Microsoft. No big deal. There were currently three IT guys on staff and I’d also have to manage and build the IT team, which I’d never done before. Sure, I could do that. I convinced him that I could and a couple of weeks later there I was.
Turned out one of the IT guys was about to move to Palm Springs. It was fine, the other two were very good. Jon Charette became my firefighter and Yong Yoon was incredibly reliable, way before he went on to run global IT for Blizzard and operations/live services for Riot. I hired a bunch more smart people and we were off. I have way more stories about the launches, which I will tell in due time.
I have so many stories and so many people to shout out from Turbine. Those bizdev trips I took to Seoul and Moscow with Judith and Robert; running pulp tabletop RPG campaigns for Nik and Sven and Allan and Ken. (Ken wound up running Magic for Wizards of the Coast for many years. A lot of people at Turbine went on to do even bigger things, although I’m not sure any of it was cooler.) Turbine is where I found out that hiring an ex-Air Force mechanic will teach you an entirely new level of precision. Turbine is where I found out how scarily intense fans can be.
I loved that dumb little warehouse.